Healing Forest helps you become calmer, healthier, more resilient through nature. Discover a treasure trove of new ideas that nourish your mind, improve your health, and deepen the relationships that matter most.
Find Your Calm
Inside the Healing Forest website you can explore unique forest walks, mindful activities, and creative nature arts from around the world.
Collect priceless benefits with our nature connection activities. Learn mindfulness in nature and Japanese forest bathing to create wellbeing for yourself and for others.
Also find excellent forest stories, films, articles, and insights that will inspire and uplift you.
The Healing Forest
For thousands of years our ancestors lived and thrived in the wilderness. Endless grasslands, dense forests and vast stretches of green were an integral part of a place we called home.
However, in the current times we live in a box, drive in a box, and even work-play-connect using a box. As a result, lifestyle ailments as well as loneliness are increasing rapidly, affecting many around the world. Living in the age of addictive technology it has become even more important for us to keep our brain healthy and learn how to protect our mind from anxiety, stress, addiction, and depression.
Fortunately, the remedies are easily available to those who know. Join us as we take you on a fascinating journey to unravel nature’s healing secrets.
Let’s see what nature can do for you and those who matter to you. Countries around the world are uncovering scientific proof about nature’s healing effects. Japan and South Korea have even created many healing forests where they practice forest bathing or healing forest walks. For our overloaded minds and overworked bodies, nature can yield surprising results.
Nature’s Surprising Gifts
As humans, we have evolved in nature. It’s what makes us feel complete. Multiple research on nature’s healing powers have shown a wide variety of benefits for our physical, mental, and social health. It provides an easy and effective way for avoiding stress, anxiety, burnout, depression, as well as reducing their ill-effects. Connecting with nature boosts our body’s immunity, energy levels, and healing ability. It can improve our mood, sleep, memory as well as focus. Nature connection also has a healthy influence on our emotional well-being and relationship skills.
Calm for your mind, body, life.
So how do we transform our connection with nature in a way that transforms us? How can we start sowing peace, happiness, and health in the world around us?
Healing Forest: Best of Nature
Slow down. Return to yourself. With overstimulated minds and busy lives, now is the moment to restore a beautiful connection with nature. Not just for ourselves, but also for our families and the planet we depend on.
Here’s our collection of useful resources carefully designed for you. Excellent ideas from nature that will keep your mind healthy, raise your resilience, and grow nourishing relationships.
Life’s Best Gifts: Over 150+ ideas for your mind and body, heart and soul. Learn how to tap into nature’s healing gifts and create ripples of positive change across your life . >> Nature Calm
Life’s Best Skills: 10 magical walks to pick up life’s most useful lessons. Discover fun activities and great learning for the challenges and adventures of the real world. >> Nature Play
Healing Forest has been created in the giving spirit of trees. Just like the forest, our site offers many hidden treasures. The more you explore, the more you discover. To get new articles and see older ones, please join our free monthly newsletter.
Forest Healing
This project is run entirely by volunteers. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below.
Helping people heal. Helping forests heal.
Healing Forest initiatives include: showcasing the best forest walks, forest meditations, nature art, and wellness forests from around the world. Organizing healing forest walks and training people in forest bathing the practice of healing in nature; healing with nature. Publishing stories of resilience and wisdom from nature. Highlighting beautiful forests in your country that can serve as healing forests. Bringing attention to inspiring projects and people that work on forest healing. Creating change leaders for the future, through our Nature Play and Nature Calm programs.
Can you please share this page so it reaches where it’s needed.
*Healing Forest Poem free download.
92 Comments on “HEALING FOREST”
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150+ Ideas for a Calm, Healthy You
Healing Forest 
I wish I had one. For the last eighteen months or so, I have been unable to leave home, and am stuck in my room 95% of the time. When I watched your film, I really broke down as I miss nature with all my heart…
Do you have any ideas on what I could do to get that peaceful feeling again?
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Dear Nan,
Thank you for reaching out. While there are no direct answers, here are a few pointers. This month we are creating a guest post on flower therapy which talks of the healing abilities of flowers. Also check out the Japanese art of Bonsai. It’s about creating a mini forest in your own home. In the end, the healing process is more about carrying nature in your heart and not just being in nature.
Wishing you great peace and calm.
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I would love to learn more about this flower therapy. I will be teaching a class on flower illustration this summer. It might be helpful to know about flower therapy and how flowers in particular can help us feel calm. Please keep me posted!
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Do you have a window in your room? Maybe someone could put a bird feeder outside your window so you could watch them eat.
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Nan,
On YouTube, I have posted brief videos of my Healing Forest walks throughout Colorado.
While you are bedridden you can view them for uplift. Just search my name in YouTube: ‘ria fenty’.
Heal swiftly.
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Nan.
I am saddened that you have to stay indoors for almost all of your day. One thing that came to me mind that may help is to ask someone to bring the elements of nature to you. For example a sound track of nature sounds with someone walking through a forest. You will hear the crunch of each surface as they walk. Also have someone bring you a small water fountain for a babbling brook sound. Then you can have some one bring you elements from a forest that you can touch and smell like smooth drift wood, a sharp evergreen branch, stones from water ways rough and harsh and also some things to smell from nature. This way your senses can experience it; your ears can hear it; you nose can smell it; and you hands can touch it. Ask someone you love to bring nature…. to you! Many blessings Kristi from Canada
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Hello Nan,
I was so deeply grieved when I had to return to the city after living for a year in the forest, I never would even go out to a park. But just watching these films rekindles the forest energy in my body again so strongly! My heart rises up in the rushing joy and wonder of my walks through the woods each night. If the films stir that in you, perhaps could watch the films each day, and bathe in the eternal and blessed memory of those living energies reactivated in your body and heart. Love to you, Ann
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When great stress has erupted in my life, I have instinctively turned to the woods and nature for solace and healing. Waiting for results of medical tests, mind awash with anxiety, it was February a couple of years ago. All the woods here covered in snow, the cold and winds too harsh to spend time outdoors, I found myself fleeing to the warmth and greenery of a local Conservatory. There, in the “tropical” room, surrounded by enormous palms and with the music of a small waterfall, my heart and mind were still and calm. I went every day for that tense week, staying for hours in the arms of Mother Nature. The tests came back OK. I love a small park near my home with nature trails. Amazingly underused, I often have it to myself. Solitude, nature, birds, a small wetland/swamp area and a pond as well as trails in the woods. This, to me, is what Heaven is.
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‘I believe there comes a time in everyone’s life, sometimes on multiple occasions, when they experience the overwhelming urge to call out to God. I was always fascinated with hiking and the woods. That realization was the turning point in my life when I lost someone very close to me. I began facing my shadow, the dark parts of me and my shame. The older I get, the more cynical I become with myself. There’s a lot in life you just can’t change. It’s okay because it’s temporary. I was struggling with moving past a traumatic incident with my aunt that passed away and I found it difficult to overcome anxiety and depression, I’ve learned to accept myself for who I am. Whatever your anxiety or trauma is about, change your way of thought….get away from negative thoughts and start chasing adventures.
“Life is a journey.” The woods are definitely where I feel most at home.”
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